Understanding the history of the entire universe


I've always had a fascination with history, which is part of the reason that I started this blog. And to me, history includes everything that's ever happened, from the beginning of the universe to the end of time. In a brief human lifespan, interrupted by the usual things of life, I really can't hope to learn everything, but that won't stop me from trying.

Aside from the obvious limitations, such as probably living no longer than 100 years (which leaves me with less than thirty years to continue my studies), there are limitations that I haven't yet reached, which may affect my physical ability to simply sit upright, take in nourishment, read, and think. But while those thoughts pop into my head every once in a while, they're not enough for me to scale back my project.

My attempts to begin to understand what a virus is last year (I'm writing this in 2021) were an absolute failure. I found a book about viruses (viri?) but got about half-way through and realized that I didn't have enough basic chemistry to understand any of it. And I decided against going and learning basic chemistry, and instead started reading about trilobites.

If you're like me, congratulations on being human! When I hear someone say that they did their own research, I understand the limitations. There simply isn't enough time in a human life to learn everything from scratch. I accept electricity, which powers this computer, without doing any research on it. I see that it works, and that's good enough for me. I also, by the way, I won't try to learn how cricket is played, although it's been an on-and-off project for years, helped along by a good friend who grew up in New 
Zealand.

I know that my nerdy intellectual curiosity worried the grownups when I was a kid, and I learned to not talk quite so much. I was exposed to all kinds of outrageous stuff because I was such an avid reader, and I had to learn to keep it to myself, or maybe find people who knew about stuff like Pangea (for example).

As of right now I'm reading a book about how walking upright made us human. That is, bipedalism, which also ties in with dinosaurs, and of course birds. There's no one IRL (In Real Life) that I can talk to about this kind of stuff, but that's OK, there never has been. But there are great minds out there who are sharing what they know, some of it in books, some of it on the internet. There are, of course, goofballs too, but that's always been true. Even when I was a little kid I was told stuff by the grownups that made me wonder if they were playing with a full deck? Really? I had to learn to be polite, smile and nod, and wander off.

History is my favorite adventure, and I place no limitations on it. To me, there's no such thing as "pre-history", and to me time is a flowing river that I can dip my hand in anywhere. Thank you for coming along with me. There's so much to learn!

Image at the top of this post: entrance to the Sky Train in 2016, Phoenix, Arizona.
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